Editorial 1 Part 2

132

EDITORIAL.

EDITORIAL. EXACT

NATURAL

SCIENCE

IN

SUFFOLK.

" True Science must be synonymous with religion, since Science is the acquirement of fact'; and facts are all that we have from which to deduce what we are and why we are here.

And the more we pry into the methods by which results are brought about, the more stupendous and wonderful becomes that great unseen power lying behind, which drifts the solar system in safety through space and yet adjusts the length of an insect's proboscis to the depth of its honey-bearing flower. What is that central intelligence ?

You may fit your dogmatic scientist with a three-hundred-diameter microscope and with a telescope having a six-foot speculum, but neither near nor far can he get a trace of that great driving power."—Sir A. C. Doyle's Stark Munro Letters, xiii.

No doubt can exist that the last thirty years have seen considerable dissemination of scientific systemacity; even the Small Farmer is beginning to work his land by the light of Reason ! Early in this Century all kinds of loose statements, in both the press and populär fiction, were thrown upon the world by persons possessed of a mere smattering of their s u b j e c t : so late as last year or those preceding it, an author attempted to trace the geologic erosion of our Suffolk coast, with no knowledge of such mediseval documents as that fundamental " wreck of the sea," which was ascertained and stored for ever-future use by the State in 1237 : the natural outcome was all inexactitude and illusion.

Nor is such misleading sophistry yet rectified.

Scientific systemacity makes no exclusive claim upon chemistry or the " awful 'ologies," as many folk still vaguely surmise.

It is apposite to all trades and walks in life. More generally it is best treated, however, in the most impersonal and uncommercial subjects, such as philosophy, nature study, philology and archaisms of all sorts.

It is best exhibited concretely in the ocular demonstrations displayed for premanent preservation in our museums at Ipswich, St. Edmundsbury and the incipient ones at Aldeburgh, Lowestoft, Sudbury and Thetford, northward at Norwich and southward at Saffron Waiden.

It is best studied in those several semi-public communities that have been erected for the express purpose of learning by combination : ' B y mutual confidence and mutual aid, great deeds are done and great discoveries made."

Such are our own Society, the Lowestoft and District Literary and Scientific Society, the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia, the Beccles Historical, the Yarmouth and the Ipswich Natural History societies.

EDITORIAL.

133

When we were a boy such wells of learning were regarded with no small awe by the man-in-the-street; even yet they are often erroneously shunned as high-brow.

Actually they have come by 1930 to be quite the reverse : formality has been modified from the starched and punctilious Victorian model to no more than is necessary for the smooth working of the business in hand : the president chaffs the secretary ; the secretary pokes fun at the members ; and the members get their own back upon both, with genial reciprocity.

But throughout this, is an allpervading undercurrent of determination to set one's foot upon at least one higher rung of Learning's ladder, and so go home feeling that one has assimilated something new and stränge from the day's doings, and broadened one's mind in some exact direction.

There is no swank in modern Science ; one does not argue whether fossil shells be better termed Molluscan Remains or forthright Shell-fish ; but one perseveres in working steadily forward, in amity with all men, for the advancement of Science in its widest sense. Whatever may arise of sound and original Observation, or of philosophical deduction by the judicious novel sequences of scraps already known, is best conveyed by publication.

In the scientific world is a wellknown maxim that " every Society is to be judged by its Transactions."

Many of our local ones publish nothing, with the result that their very existence will be forgotten soon after the membership becomes dissolved.

Only by the practice of exactitude in the Observation and publication of details is it possible to erect a thoroughly sound purview of the whole.

We want more such delightful intercourse as the above societies afford—their minority in western Suffolk is conspicuous—and it is no less than basic to always recollect personalness should be rigidly excluded : to speak is to benefit others by your knowledge, in no way to aggrandise yourself. Above all, let us never state as fact what we are not prepared to prove by demonstration and reference.

The commercial tendency of the age leaves little leisure to tackle abstruse problems, with the consequence that speakers upon them are at present all too few, and the arrangement for lectures on Natural Science discouragingly difficult.

T H E HOOKER

MEMORIAL.

' Before us and beside us, though hidden in Thine hand, A cloud unseen of witness, our Eider Comrades stand One family unbroken.'—Commemoration Hymn. is to be a function at Haiesworth in honour of the Hookers, father and son, on 17th August next; the former

THERE

134

EDITORIAL.

lived there and the latter was born there. The International Congress of Botanists will be visiting Cambridge at that time, and it is proposed to unveil a Memorial to the Hookers in the church at Haiesworth : Huxley has drafted an inscription for it. Prof. F. W. Oliver, now of Cairo University, has been responsible for the idea and its execution. It might be suitable for the next number of our Suffolk Naturalists' " Transactions " to include a pretty füll account of the Hookers' work ; this should interest all Botanists in the county and outside (wrote Lord Ullswater, in lit. 24th Dec. 1929).

S I R WILLIAM JACKSON HOOKER—see portrait*—was born in 1785 at Norwich, where the discovery of a peculiar Moss introduced him to Sir James Edward Smith, at whose suggestion Hooker, a man of means, travelled throughout Britain and in 1809 Iceland (' Journal of a Tour in Iceland,' 1813), collecting botanical specimens. That year he took up a business venture in, and came to live at Quay-street, Haiesworth where still stands his erstwhile house.

But the venture failed by 1820, when he left that town and accepted the botanical professoriate of Glasgow University ; followed in 1840 by the directorship of the Royal Botanic gardens at Kew, where yet remains his Herbarium, the largest and most complete then extant and later acquired for the nation.

He published ' The British Flora ' in 1842, and died in 1865.

S I R J O S E P H DALTON H O O K E R was born at his father's Haiesworth house in 1817, and educated at Cambridge. He held an official position in the Antarctic Expedition of the Erebus and Terror, during which he compiled the celebrated ' Flora Antarctica ' ; later he travelled throughout the Himalaya Mountains of Asia (' Himalayan Journals,' 1854), in Utah and other countries of America.

In 1865 he took up his father's directorship of Kew Gardens ; and in 1884 he published ' The Student's Flora of the British Islands,' after a brilliant career, which culminated in 1876 with the Presidency of the Royal Society. Joseph Hooker, said Sir David Prain on 17th August, was a great traveller and supporter of the British school of Biology ; and before his 1911 death, Count Morner of Stockholm in 1907 had regarded his botanical knowledge as threatening to rival that of the great Swede, Linnjeus, ' father of Natural Science.'

T H E DEDICATION SERVICE was duly held on 17th August, 1 9 3 0 , Lord Ullswater reading the Lesson and Bishop Whittingham delivering a very apposite address after unveiling the mural memorial, inscribed : " This Tablet records the Association / * These t h r e e illustrations w e owe t o t h e c o u r t e s y of t h e " E a s t Anglian Daily Times."—ED.

EDITORIAL.

135

with Haiesworth of Sir William Hooker / and of his son Sir Joseph who in / succession became Directors of the / Royal Botanic Gardens Kew Sir / William Hooker lived in Haiesworth / from 1809 to 1820 and here Sir Joseph / was born in 1817 —Erected 1930 Gerrard," within a floral bordure, surmounted by the setting sun below five conventional birds volant. Some seventy members of the above Congress, including Sir David Prain who is the Hookers' successor at Kew, Dr. A. W. Hill the Gardens' director, Prof. F. O. Bower, president of the British Association and Hooker's successor at Glasgow, Prof.

Oliver (Hon. See.) and Lord Ullswater (Chairman of the Memorial Committee which never met, for funds flowed in) were present, with a churchful of E.Anglian folk among whom the Suffolk Naturalists' Society was represented by Mr. Arthur Mayfield, F.L.S., and other Members.

That was a glorious evening, balmy and windless ; on our way homewards, hedge-birds were calling and pigeons cooing on every side along the untarred road at Heveningham. Our mind went on in its floral groove, with the wayside Heracleum sphondylium and A ngelica sylvestris, both here six feet in height and covered on their fragrant stylopods with flies, saw-flies, bees and beetles, mainly the scarlet Rhagonycha fulva, Scop.

All the flowers were but tricoloured : white were these two tall parsleys, the Enchanter's Nightshade, Old Man's Beard, Chcerophyllum temulum, yarrow and the bramble-petals; gold were Silaus flavescens, Agrimony, Flea-bane, Hawkweed, the eyes of bramble and beaks of Dulcamara ; and contrasting vividly with both came the imperial purple of Woundwort, Knapweed, the delicate Vicia cracca, Butter-burr, water Mint and the petals of the Nightshade. All grew profusely within a hundred yards in the low sunlight of that country lane, shadowed by trees of the park ; but few could have known them at a glance before William Kirby, the Hookers and Bentham came to open men's eyes to these delightful Flowers of the Field : so, with Kipling, " Let us now praise famous men— Men of little showing— For their work continueth, Broad and deep continueth, Greater than their knowing."

OUR

TREES.

stalwart East Anglian, Sir Rider Haggard, confessed that he " did love a good tree. There it stands so strong and sturdy, yet so beautiful and a very type of the best sort of man. How proudly it lifts its bare head to the winter storms, and with THAT

136

EDITORIAL.

what a füll heart it rejoices when the spring has come again !

How grand its voice is, too, when it talks with the wind : a thousand seolian harps cannot equal the beauty of the sighing of a great tree in leaf. All day it points to the sunshine and all night to the stars ; and thus, passionless and yet füll of life, it endures through the centuries, come storm, come shine, drawing its sustenance from the deep bosom of its mother earth and, as the slow years roll by, learning the great mysteries of growth and of decay. And so on and on, through generations : outliving individuals, customs, dynasties—all, save the landscape it adorns and human nature—tili the appointed day when the wind wins the long battle and rejoices over a reclaimed space, or death puts the last stroke to his lingering work.

Ah, one should always think twice before one cuts down a tree ! " (Allan Quartermain, cap. xiv). Tree-worship, Yggdrasil, is one of the finest legacies bequeathed to our blood by the Vikings ; and, even before their rise, Virgil wrote the oft-quoted : " Veluti annoso validam cum robore Quercum Alpini Boreae, nunc hinc, nunc flatibus illiue Eruere inter se certant : it Stridor et alte consternunt cerram concusso stipile frondes : Ipsa hseret scopulis, et quantum vertice ad auras Aetherias tantum radice in Tartara tendit."

The Suffolk Naturalists' Society is only too glad to surrender most of the onus of Beauty Preservation, an outstanding feature at our inception and one we shall always Shoulder forcefully, to the new and very welcome " Suffolk Preservation Society " which was inaugurated in February, whose sole object is to combat the destruction of our rural amenities.

It seems to extend further, indeed ; for the able Hon. Secretary, Mrs. Elmer Schofield of Otley High House, on 6th August last wrote to the local press stoutly protesting against the felling of two century-old Whitethorns in Christchurch Park.

All right-minded folk collaborated in the London conference of this Preservation society with similar bodies, organised by the Preservation of Rural England league during 9 t h - l l t h October, when the key-note sounded upon things ' to see and enjoy, not harm and destroy ' : beauty maintained, hideosity condemned.

Here our Life-member, Lord Ullswater, became the Man-in-the-Lane with eyes to see and sensibilities to duly appreciate Nature in primeval virginity, untainted by homocidal spoliation. " The haunts of ancient peace are gradually disappearing, supplanted by the roar of the charabanc and the rush of the Rolls-Royce," he pointed out : In his own county of Suffolk it is unnecessary to destroy so much, for young trees take long to attain maturity and the stately old ones should be kept. " We are depriving those who come after us of seeing England as we have seen her, in all her

EDITORIAL.

137

beauty." School-inspectors exterminate rare plants; a F.R.H.S. translates them to his garden (" Shame ! "). The sportsman to be admired is not he who goes out and kills something, but he who endures cramp for hours to photograph birds sitting upon their nests ; and the Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves, whereof he is president, has succeeded in augmenting the propagation of the Bittern (Botaurus stellaris, L.), Grebe (Ardetta minuta, L.), Eagle (Aquila chryscetus, L.), Wild Cat (Felis catus, L.) and even the Seal.

Bright, indeed, is the prospect when wefindthe Minister of Transport announcing last August that " Trees should not be felled unless such a course is absolutely unavoidable. Treeplanting should be encouraged and the trees so planted as to allow of future road-widening," adding that amenities might be preserved if old hedges and hedge-timber were left standing by the mere diversion of foot-paths to the inner side of them, a novel and most excellent practice that already has come into use at Saxmundham, to the south of Ipswich, and elsewhere in our county. Also good is the sparcity of destruction reported to our Society during this year : the Clearing of a holt in Ashfield is the sole instance that has come to our knowledge ; and we are glad that the ancient, though not particularlyfine,oaks along the southern side of Chantry Park have been spared, at least hitherto.

A very great deal is being done to counteract both the loss, by road-widening, of trees ; and also the denudation of no less than four hundred andfiftythousand acres, that the last war cost this country : of these already a hundred and sixty thousand have been replanted by the National Forestry commissioners.

In all directions such afforestation progresses apace : in the west over amillion trees have been put in alongside the Great Western railway since 1920, upon some twenty-seven thousand acres of land that is either unsuited for agriculture or was robbed of its woods in the war that ended in 1918. Dartmoor, or five thousand acres of it, is to be similarly planted by these Commissioners in the course of the next decade ; and this as a mere preliminary step towards the timber that will extend over no less than eighty years and embrace a million and three-quarter acres. In the north, a third of the Commissioners total area lies in Scotland, but Ireland is untouched ; there half the total trees are Corsican and Scots Pines, and a quarter are Larch, all most satisfactory species, and their distribution is a suitable number o( plants to each acre. Nearer home, many of our new or broadened roads are beautified, in accordance with the Minister of Transport's suggestion, by young trees of various sorts, notably Hollies, Scots Pines, Poplars and other deciduous species along the by-pass at Bramford and Wash-

SIR W I L L I A M

HOOKER.

SIR JOSEPH

HOOKER.

138

EDITORIAL.

brook. For the most part, however, new trees are ornamental Conifene, as is to be seen at Witnesham and the Valley Road in Ipswich ; though, at East Bergholt, Gorse takes their place.

The largest forest in all Britain hitherto planted is that upon the Breckland, on the borders of Suffolk and Norfolk (for details of the district, cf. Trans. Norf. Nat. Soc. x, p. 138 ; and for those of the new forest, cf. I.e. xii, p. 673) ; when complete it will outvie the limits of our present most glorious New Forest in Hants.

Unfortunately all that the National Forestry commission does is purely commercial in object; the employment is about five men to every thousand acres ; and all timber will be felled upon attaining maturity.

How truly populär the rural feeling has become was well illustrated in mid-September by the Federation of Rambling Clubs, Pedestrians' Association, Commons and Footpaths Preservation Society and that for Rural England. They collectively adopted, to combat Ulility's uglification, like the well-known Red and Blue emblems—and let all our Nature Lovers freely display—the fresh GREEN CROSS of Rural England.